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Lately I have needed to laugh my ass off to get through what we’ll call one of the crappier times of our lives here at JimOnLight.com. Things are looking up, however, and that means the laughs have become natural again!

I can’t have all of these awesome laughs all to myself, I just don’t see that it’s fair to the Universe. So take this next few minutes and just LAUGH!

Today is the 9th birthday of InLight Gobos, the brainchild of Rick Hutton. You know Rick, right? If you’ve ever used a VL5, you know Rick. He’s one of the brains that made Vari*Lite what it is, and he developed the VL5. He is, in all aspects of the word, a true geek – and an awesome dude.

Rick and his lovely wife Adriana (and avid Words with Friends player who is constantly whipping me at that game) run InLight Gobos – their shop is in Dallas, and they make the best freaking glass gobos in the business. That’s a fact. Their gobos are the thinnest glass gobos in the business – 1.7mm thick – and the process they use puts the image all into one plane so there is no fuzzy crappy focus when you throw it into a fixture.

InLight Gobos’ services, from the website:

Custom and Catalog Glass Gobos – Full Color, Greyscale and Black and White

Custom Metal Gobos – Custom metal in any size

Wedding Gobos – Design you own special gobo for your special day

DiGiGOBOS® – Royalty free digital content in SD and HD formats

GAM on GLASS™ – Any GAM pattern can be produced in glass for extended use

Yeah. That’s all Rick and InLight. I love that freaking gobo! I just want to cover a room in those! InLight Gobos are finding their way all over the place, and have been for a while – they were at E3 recently in the Nintendo booth, people are spec’ing them all over the place for projects, and recently Rick and Adriana started doing custom wedding gobos!

InLight Gobos is also on Twitter – make sure you’re following @InLightGobos!

From the InLight Gobos website:

Their catalogue is pretty great – I highly recommend checking it out. They do full color gobos, greyscale, and pure black and white – custom or stock. Check out the InLight Gobos catalogue here, and prepare to be impressed. Rick also had a cool idea that he’s implemented into a service – gobo rental! InLight Gobos has a Rent-A-Gobo program with a select group of their stock patterns, all glass. Definitely check it out.

I have to show you some of my favorites from the InLight Gobos collection – these are some official JimOnLight.com favorites:

“Liquid”

“Shocking”

“Jungle”

“Comb-Atic”

“Firework 1”

“Foiled Plot”

On the history of the company:

InLight Gobos opened its doors on August 1st, 2002 with a simple mission to bring the best quality glass gobos at a competitive price to the lighting and entertainment industries. This mission still stands today. Over the years we have continued to bring new programs and innovations to the industry. Our partnership with Beacon SSR Stage Light AB in Sweden allows us to produce the thinnest full color gobos in the market. We continue to work closely with Beacon to improve our processes and the quality of our products. Our customers and employees are the most important assets we have, therefor we strive to continually improve all aspects of our business. We are always open to suggestions to improve our operation and fulfill your needs.

The Hubble telescope (I’m sorry, “Space Observatory”) recently got a big upgrade – in addition to a new camera, it got two repairs that made the observatory capable of all kinds of new awesomeness. From the press release at NASA:

“We couldn’t be more thrilled with the quality of the images from the new Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) and repaired Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS), and the spectra from the Cosmic Origins Spectrograph (COS) and the Space Telescope Imaging Spectrograph (STIS),” said Keith Noll, leader of a team at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, which planned the early release observations. “The targets we’ve selected to showcase the telescope reveal the great range of capabilities in our newly upgraded Hubble.”

These results are compelling evidence of the success of the STS-125 servicing mission in May, which has brought the space observatory to the apex of its scientific performance. Two new instruments, the WFC3 and COS, were installed, and two others, the ACS and STIS, were repaired at the circuit board level. Mission scientists also announced Wednesday that the Near Infrared Camera and Multi-Object Spectrometer was brought back into operation during the three months of calibration and testing.

“On this mission we wanted to replenish the ‘tool kit’ of Hubble instruments on which scientists around the world rely to carry out their cutting-edge research,” said David Leckrone, senior project scientist for Hubble at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. “Prior to this servicing mission, we had only three unique instrument channels still working, and today we have 13. I’m very proud to be able to say, ‘mission accomplished.’ “

Is it cheesy for me to say that these images are out of this world? They truly are – check them out, they’re amazing.

I have neglected the Flickr Pool post for a handful of Sundays. I am sorry about that, everything has been super busy!

I chose 8 images, and narrowed it down to three for this week’s post. Lexi has a photo blog (the upward facing face) that I read regularly, BazPics is always posting beautiful stuff, and Luca Pierro is a very talented photographer. Check their work out!

I’m going to start doing this every Sunday. The JimOnLight.com Flickr Pool has 46 members as of Friday, February 6, 2009 – here are five great images added to the pool. There is some great stuff here – if you’re a member of Flickr, please join the group!

My wife and I bought a new DSLR a few weeks ago, and I took it on my trip to LDI. I’m going to try to post one or two of these a day, and I have about 30 groups of photos of different booths and such – LDI 2008 was a great time. I got to meet Mike Zinman of The Zinman Co, I got to hang out with old friends, and I saw a heckuva lot of great technology. There’s some amazing LED technology out right now by companies like iLight and Traxon. Don’t worry, I have pictures of their stuff too!

Here’s some general LDI images – if you were there, leave a comment! I bet we passed right by each other eleventy times.

The Arri booth and the Strong booth to the right – that’s either Barco or Lasernet to the left (the green).